Personally I think this may be down to the inability to get hold of guns. Knife crime is up as well, and knives and acid are far easier to get than guns.
I have no evidence for this, and no doubt people will correct me; but this is all very off putting.
Well, investigators could find a container that had contained the type of acid used in the attack, and lift prints and/or DNA from that, couldn't they? Is there any reason why that's harder than finding the knife, and finding prints or DNA on it?
Adding guns to the equation just adds more weapons available to both attackers and victims.
Victims don't carry around weapons to defend themselves right now, if they were able to get hold of a gun that wouldn't change. Essentially the only thing that changes is on the attacker's side; great, so now you've added guns to that equation.
Well, if you do that, then I guess you also need to arm the police. Most police force in the UK is not firearmed (the UK has a strong notion that the police are civilians in uniform), but if you're giving more tools to attackers, the police will need to respond in kind.
So effectively, by adding guns, you've done nothing to prevent acid attacks and you made it so that the police making a mistake can end a life.
I'm not sure that the person you're responding to is advocating for guns. They are just pointing out that violent people don't stop being violent just because guns are removed from the picture.
For example, handguns and other concealable weapons were almost non-existent in Australia when I was living there. As a side effect, there were a lot of fistfights; far more than I've ever seen at equivalent bars/pubs in the US. That sucked, but I still found it preferable to being shot/mugged at gunpoint.
Likewise, acid attacks are terrible, and there are possibly more of them since guns and knives are less accessible. Doesn't mean that overall things are worse because of the ban.
Could people conceivably keep a package of baking soda or calcium carbonate with them? would that be an effective on-the-spot antidote? Hmm or maybe get to the nearest kiosk and get some alka seltzer...
Potentially, but the neutralization of sulfuric acid releases a ton of heat (sometimes enough to crack glassware). By neutralizing the sulfuric acid without giving the heat anywhere to dissipate, you might just end up making things worse.
Also, as a small unrelated note, I doubt calcium carbonate would work well for neutralizing sulfuric acid-- the calcium sulfate formed is for the most part insoluble and stops the reaction.
Best thing would probably be a lot of water. Here's a video of someone willingly pouring 98% sulfuric acid onto their hand, they just wash it off: https://youtu.be/XeVZQoJ5FdE?t=284 . Plus, if someone pours a random liquid onto you, it's kind of hard to know if it's water, acid, lye...
I was about to say that adding water would be bad in the case of lye, but after some research it seems I was wrong. Probably watched/read "Fight Club" too often. Apparently using an acid like vinegar to neutralize lye is more painful than flushing with water and creates a lot of heat because of the strong reaction.[1,2] So the recommendation actually is to just flush with water for 15 minutes.[3]
If anyone wonders why, it is because the UK over here has a little legal loophole where carrying acid in any reasonable (non-truckload) amount is not in any way a criminal or incriminating act, where-as guns, knives, and loads of other things are.
What is sad is it's taking so long for policians to wake up and realise that some non-scientist carrying a huge jug of acid in a backpack is kinda obviously incriminating...
so carrying a shopping bag with domestic drain cleaner inside is obviously incriminating? and carrying a shopping bag with a new knife set is incriminating?
If you're young, in an area with frequent attacks, moving with a gang, and not on a trajectory from the store to the location of your claimed clogged drain, then yes, I'd say it's pretty incriminating.
Street officers are usually pretty experienced and capable of making a judgement whether this should be looked into further. If needed, the evidence and circumstances can be reviwed in court.
It's not an all or nothing situation. We're capable of nuance.
it is interesting how this topic intersects with gun control and society at large. the solution to this acid attack problem is the same as the solution to a gun violence or knife violence problem: somehow reduce the number of violent nothing-to-lose people that are on the streets. and the number one way to do that is to structure society in a way that gives children a safe and productive environment, and in a way that makes good behaviour much more profitable than bad behaviour. with current public schools and current job prospects, it is no surprise that their society has come to the point of considering a ban on domestic drain cleaner. if you have a well structured society, then eventually it will be filled with good people. and a society full of good people has no need for bans on guns or draino. i think that we could come closer to that vision simply by reaching out to a child in your area and teaching them something.
Do you think that a well structured society has no need for a ban on nuclear weapons? If not, how do you draw the conclusion that such a ban is unneeded for guns?
this is an excellent observation and it is actually the point of nucleation from which my current point of view was spawned. one can imagine a kind of scale that could be used to rate an individual person. left to their own devices, in many, many different scenarios, what kind of behaviour does that person exhibit? maybe the scale could be non-violent to violent or un-productive to productive. it is tempting to abandon the idea of "rating" people because people are complex, and their behaviour changes depending on the situation and various other factors. but there are examples that show that such a scale is useful. but we all know, anecdotally, that people can be rated on such a scale. people who benefit from great parents and mentors, who had excellent educations, had excellent nutrition and so on, reside on the more positive end of the scale.
so the people are the building blocks from which a society is built. everything in that society is a function of the people. so it is possible to assess a given society on a similar scale to the people: a certain society that has a certain distribution of certain kinds of people will experience certain outcomes. let us imagine that we take a large sample of societies and subject them to this idea where everyone gets their own personal nuclear weapon. in fact, lets boil it down to its logical core: let us imagine that every single person in society is given a button. if they press the button, the entire society will be instantly destroyed. they are all aware of this when they get their button.
on one extreme side of the scale or spectrum, a society filled with extremely smart, well educated, well adjusted and emotionally healthy people who all have great jobs and lives, in other words a properly structured society filled with very good people, not a single instance of button pressing would occur. you could in fact give each person the power to end the world and the world would go on unharmed. this is the goal. it can never be achieved because sometimes people go insane or have a bad break up or what have you, but its no different than an electronic device trying to use power as efficiently as possible: electronics strive for zero power consumption and societies should strive to reach the point where the aforementioned scenario is possible.
now we look at the real world. we see that gun control, voting, and all kinds of other things are actually the same thing: different ways in which citizens are trusted or not trusted with power. we see that in a healthy democracy or republic, the vote is far more powerful than the gun. we see that any healthy democracy or republic requires that its citizens are up to the task of handling power responsibly. and i think that if you agree with all the previous statements, you agree that much of the western world is in a lot of trouble right now. and say that without even the smallest shred of arrogance or snobbery.
so, this leads to a very interesting consideration of the limits of power that the citizens of the united states or the united kingdom might handle before something bad happened. and it is also fun to consider what the maximum amount of power the citizens are capable of handling after some kind of focused effort to make them ready. how much power could they handle if schools and jobs and everything were made better? what is the best outcome we might hope to achieve?
so the answer to your questions is that no, individuals probably shouldnt have nukes but they could probably handle some really dangerous stuff like chemical weapons or heavy machine guns if you just gave them the tools they need.
I agree with you to a degree. But I think a more useful way of thinking about it is through the lens of risk. Each citizen carries a risk of violence. Weapons multiply that violence, education and socialization reduce its probability. So we have an equation:
ExpectedHarm = P_incident * Harm
Weapons multiply harm, and education reduces P. Nuclear weapons cause ExpectedHarm to approach infinity almost regardless of P_incident, so they are out. But guns, knives, acid, and other weapons all sit along a continuum.
Increasing access to guns unquestionably increases ExpectedHarm (arguments like 'if everyone had guns, people would be well behaved' are, of course, ridiculous on their face), but there are social benefits to guns. Some people enjoy hunting, sport shooting, and carrying a gun makes many people 'feel' safer (which, though hard to quantify, remains a true social good, in some sense). Guns are also, to some degree, a check on government power. I don't particularly like the Bundy's position or what they stood for, but their access to guns is absolutely what gave them the power to make that stand. You can count this as a positive or negative depending on your perspective. I tend to count it as a positive even though most uses of it, like the Bundy's, I strongly disagree with.
And finally, there is the sort of 'constant' boost to the positive side you get from the general bias we ought to have against banning things (you may choose to set this to zero or negative if you hate freedom). So, the full equation is:
If this expression is greater than zero, you should leave it alone. This does ignore some theoretical nonlinear terms (e.g. banning guns increases the probability of other forms of violence, or vice versa), but it more or less captures the idea. Depending on which values you input for various terms, you'll get a different answer.
All of that is to say that whether or not any given weapon ought to be legal should be evaluated according to a framework that looks something like the above.
right, but what is missing here is the observation that all the duties of a citizen also carry power to do harm. therefore, in order for society to prosper, its citizens must be able to handle guns and draino, because voting and going about their everyday lives have just as much potential to ruin things.
That's an interesting perspective, but I think those activities have fairly different risk profiles. Voting is a collective behavior and its harms are therefore smoothed through averaging. Gun violence isn't really like this. If 1% of the population votes in a crazy way, that's not such a big deal, but if 1% of the population engages in gun violence, that's an enormous problem.
I've upvoted you but we also need to crack down hard on the people that commit these terrible crimes. Worse than murder, this is a way of causing someone lifelong suffering, and in the lag time before utopia arrives we have to be pragmatic.
> British retailers are now talking about licensing the purchase of sulfuric acid.
Banning or controlling something that could be used as a weapon is not the solution. As has been already demonstrated by controlling firearms and knives, criminals will just find an alternative.
I'd be more inclined to blame the reduction in violent crime in NYC on it's staggering large and well-equipped police force. If a criminal really wanted a gun in NYC, they probably aren't going to obtain one legally so making them harder to get only creates a minor inconvenience.
A key question here is what has changed to make these attacks more prevalent. One possibility is it is related to immigration and changing demographics. The area with the most acid attacks by far, Newham ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/acid-attack-capital-bri... ) is also very immigrant heavy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Newham#Demog... ). In this NPR article, the example is of a guy with a white/British name attacking someone of middle eastern heritage -- but I know from experience on news coverage in my own region that NPR cannot be trusted on racial issues to select anecdotes that match the real patterns of behavior. Do any of the Brits here have any more insight on how immigration and changing demographics might be related to these attacks?
Member of open-minded community that values data, science, evidence, citations, and proof dismisses strongly correlated conclusion due to ideological insubordination, news at eleven.
There is a correlation between the % of Muslim population and # of acid attacks. This could be interpreted different ways (i.e. perhaps Muslims are being targeted by others?)... But to call someone's viewpoint alt-right dogwhistle because they bring up the other obvious possibility is close-minded and is what leads to these sorts of problems in the first place.
Focusing on just the UK as if it was some mystically isolated scenario is intentionally skewing the statistics and the discussion to allow for demographic plausible deniability.
I'm not here to assert the correctness of my position, for the record, especially since I've already pointed out one only has to look at similar cases from Germany and Sweden. I've already placed my bets on the inevitable rise of European private prisons within the next ten years.
I don't understand your point - the thread is about the issue in the UK - it could be completely different to the issue in other places. Your assertion that it has to be the same is, quite frankly, naive - existing crime levels, media exposure, existing acid attacks could all make the situation massively different.
Sounds to me like you are saying you have no evidence for that claim.
Again - I'm sure you could locate the source or find much more recent maps to show the correlation. The borough with the second highest Muslim population currently has the highest number of Acid attacks.
At a glance, those two maps don't really correlate, and are completely useless anyway - if immigrants are more likely to come to poorer areas, for example, I could imagine a link between crime and poor areas in general, so acid attacks would be highest in those places anyway.
If you want to make such a outlandish claim, you need real sources where this has been studied and thought out carefully.
Sounds to me like you are making up statistics to push your narrative. It sounds a lot like the "black people are only x% of the population, but y% of prisoners in the USA!" you hear racists hark back to a lot. See a vague correlation, assume causation.
I would like to point out that, anecdotally, the articles you read about this in newspapers do generally have that pattern. Not always. Does seem to involve love in pretty much every single article I've read. The biggest part of those incidents, however, is muslim families imposing punishment on daughters. And yes, they often do it specifically in ways to minimize punishment. Not just by selecting the weapons, for instance they have minors do it, or they do it in large groups so everybody has to protect eachother and there is no single responsible person.
I also dislike your implication. Just because numbers don't seem to pass your standard (which isn't a coincidence, those numbers are very politically charged) does not change the fact that it is very much a problem that muslim communities impose their "values" on women (and elderly, and kids, and ...) with violence in immigrant neighborhoods in the west. Most worrisome these days is that not a week goes by without an article how some banal government intervention (fire brigade, wasps, car crash, shoplifting, ...) goes by without muslim youth attacking everyone, the police, firemen, bystanders, ...
But if you want to see whether this is happening or not, just go there. They've got good food (if you like it), and it won't take you very long to see aggression in the street against women at all. Probably nothing as serious as acid throwing, probably just shouting, but you'll see it. In the evening, especially on fridays, you stand a very good chance to see a physical confrontation between the police and locals near the police station or perhaps the train station.
Search it and you'll see just how common and normal these things are. Or visit.
I don't care how much your worldview depends on denying these things are real. They are fact, they are obvious, and they have become so banal, so normal, and in some cases so brutal. Meanwhile, you'll never read about these incidents in either the normal press, or on the BBC or newspapers, and figures detailing these events are so absurd they're utterly ridiculous. More and more stories of people forced out by "crime" (somehow specifically targeting them and not others) keep finding me and dismissing all of them as if this doesn't exist, well, I wish you wouldn't do that.
Again, you are making wild, spurious claims with no evidence to back them up. You are the one making assertions about entire races and groups of people and then going "but why should I need strong evidence?"
I can find you a similar number of articles, youtube videos, or whatever of white English attackers. Your "evidence" doesn't show what you claim it does, and you are drawing incorrect conclusions from them. These are not "my standards" - they are the standards for something to be believable, to be valid.
You say "just go there" - I have! I currently live in a town with a very large immigrant population. I have lived in Leicester, the only city in the UK where you are technically a minority as a white English person. I did not see what you are describing.
You have seen a trend of articles and extrapolated them wrongly - it's a common mistake, but one we have seen before. It could be your sources are biased, reporting on those cases more, it could be that the link you are inferring is wrong, it could be that you are selectively remembering articles or picking them out. There is a reason we rely on more than "well, I remember a lot of cases of X being reported" when understanding the world.
Your claim it's all some conspiracy being covered up is untrue. If it was true, where is the evidence - your anecdotal evidence isn't useful. If that's all you respect, well, my years of living in places that fit this bill provide plenty of "counter" anecdotal evidence, so even by that (terrible) standard, it's rubbish.
If your claim is so "obviously" true, then prove it. Find the statistics - show the correlation is there, show that it's not other factors making the correlation.
Given just how problematic your reasoning is, I hope you change your mind here. Let me explain.
I don't understand your reasoning. First you claim to be evidence based, and then say wild claims without back up. Okay. I'm sorry but I'm a math major. So let's analyse the claims:
1) my claim is that these attacks happen, and secondarily that they're common in specific areas
2) your claim is that they don't happen
Now my claim is what a logician would call an existential claim. A single anecdote obviously means that it is true, and yes, for an existence proof a single example is enough. This is exactly the approach every constructionist proof follows. And there are some beautiful and important constructionist proofs and I assure you they are quite valid. It doesn't prove the extent of the problem, but it does prove the claim is true. Of course a number of anecdotes does prove the extent of the problem, in the sense that it provides a lower bound. No need for statistics (but read on). Regardless, a single anecdote logically rejects your claim. Many anecdotes, and we both know that there are a great number such anecdotes, even if you count just in trustworthy papers, prove my claim. Again, no need for statistics.
So your supposed scientific view is really bullshit.
Then, your whole argument and it's conclusion is a logical fallacy known as "argument from ignorance". There is a claim A, and you say you destroy the arguments supporting A, and then conclude that (not A) must be true. Logic only allows a claim that "A or (not A)" is true, in that situation. It doesn't matter whether you successfully countered those arguments in ironclad logic, since (not A) NEVER follows. The conclusion closest to your thesis that you can possibly achieve is "we don't know if these things happen or not".
But your arguments have yet more problems than merely the method you claim to be using for deciding the truth, and the logical fallacy used in reaching your conclusion. Your arguments don't actually imply a difference. As a statistician would say, they contain zero information. This means that you could be saying 100% the literal truth and your thesis could be true or false, you could be entirely lying about everything and your thesis could be true or false. Your arguments are not a distinguishing factor in rejecting or accepting the claim that you make. So why make them ?
Your arguments are merely rhetorical, and devoid of meaning. They only appear related. Even worse: the criticism of anecdotes, given your claim, actually attempts to point out a flaw where there is none. It is a direct attempt to deceive. Maybe you're deceiving yourself and this is simply an error, maybe not.
And of course, the other details. First of all, we were all talking here about London, not Leicester. Apparently there are a few other cities that are really also part of London where this also happens. I'm glad to hear Leicester is not one of them.
As for the conspiracy, see [1], for example. Given that logically, a positive claim can be proven by giving a single positive example, while a negative claim (like your "not a conspiracy") cannot be proven by any amount of evidence. Note that anecdotes DO prove a positive claim. If the claim is that something happens, a single such anecdote obviously proves this to be the case. You claim to be evidence-based, and we both know what logic says in this case.
The truth is that while there is a conspiracy to hide these facts, it is not that powerful or well organised at all. It is just a bunch of idiots protecting their reputation under direction of their management. The truth is far worse: these things, like the new normal of attacks on the police and firefighters in almost every instance are banal, trivial, and well known. Life adapts. The police force is no exception. No newspaper reports that tide rose today just like every time it did before. No newspaper reports that there were -once again- "mil...
My claim is not that attacks don't happen, my claim is that your original statement ("There is a correlation between the % of Muslim population and # of acid attacks") is unsupported. You are creating a strawman of my argument to fight. I never claimed anything else, and your rant is totally off-point. You are the one making the claim, you are the one who can't back it up.
You then proceed to say we are talking about London - your statement was not bounded to London - if your correlation only holds in London, why is that? That implies that there is another factor influencing things, and only further undermines your link.
Again, you then go on to continue to rant about positive claims - the statement I am arguing was not "acid attacks have happened", it was the one given above, which is not proven by a single positive example. You are not presenting evidence to back up the statement you made.
And then you go into further rants about reporting - which is all totally irrelevant. You can't make broad claims about groups of people based on any reporting like that. It is clear the data can be misleading because of why and how those stories are chosen. Again, you keep falling back to "you can't say this didn't happen" - no one was claiming that! I said I never saw it happen in locations I lived to show the pointlessness of your anecdotal evidence - there is selection bias at play, and it's too small a sample. I'm not claiming they never happened, just that your argument does not prove the point you made. Just because it happened, and was reported on, does not prove a causal link or even a correlation.
Let me make this clear: You made a claim ("There is a correlation between the % of Muslim population and # of acid attacks") with no evidence. If you want to say something like that, you need proof. That is what I have been saying - very clearly - all along.
I think you'll find, if you check, that that % claim was made by "mcrocop", not by me. It is not what I'm arguing.
My claim was that muslim communities do in fact commit violent attacks against people they perceive as being somehow violating islam/sharia (or merely perceived as vulnerable or undesirable for that matter). I then illustrated with examples that, firstly these attacks do happen, and secondly, that the government statistics on that are "routinely misreported" (quote from the linked article).
And once again you make the argument from ignorance logical fallacy. Just because such a correlation cannot be proven DOES NOT prove the opposite. It does not provide any reassurance that your thesis is true. And if you look at it on a somewhat larger scale you will see how your claim is really the unlikely side of the argument.
It is an absolute known fact that muslim communities, by and large, attack their own members if they are perceived to act against sharia. Read Human Rights Watch. Over 20% of the total human population lives in nation where such attacks are in the laws.
Given that over 90% of muslims worldwide do these attacks, directly or through state actions (passively if you will), why would any sane person even accept your claim that such a thing is not done in immigrant communities as a default claim that requires no evidence ? Talk about far fetched.
Well, then you jumped in to reply to my post with a useless claim about something happening that we all already know.
Again, I am not arguing the opposite is proven! You are literally putting words in my mouth.
You are arguing a totally separate point, and just decided to reply to me, for some reason. Please actually read the posts you are replying to and stay on-topic. Your off-topic rants are useless, and you have wasted a lot of my time trying to work out what the hell you are going on about.
Jumping to conclusions that fit your anti-immigrant racial prejudice, pretending that it’s actually about “cultural differences”, complaining about “virtue signalling”. It’s like playing a game of alt-right bingo here.
>Jumping to conclusions that fit your anti-immigrant racial prejudice, pretending that it’s actually about “cultural differences”, complaining about “virtue signalling”. It’s like playing a game of alt-right bingo here.
You forgot to call me a "Nazi" and "bigot" and "facist" and all the other things you ANTIFA folks call those who have different opinions than yourselves.
Ah, shoehorning “antifa” into the conversation (with vague insinuations that anti-fascism is somehow a bad thing), that’s another one.
How many more alt-right talking points can you squeeze out? Your reaction is so amusingly predictable, it’s sad to see someone so programmed to dullness.
Would you please not create accounts to engage in political flamewar here, regardless of how bad another commenter may be behaving? I've banned this one. As the site guidelines explain (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), the way to deal with egregious comments is not to feed them by responding in kind, but to flag them. In particularly bad cases you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We value that sort of heads-up from users, because HN's firehose is much too large for us to see everything that goes on here.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is seriously not ok here. This is explained in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
"The global pattern is very much males attacking young women and girls, relating to rejected sexual advances or marriage proposals or dowry-related attacks," he says.
But most of the attacks in the U.K. are random and are often connected to robberies or gang violence. Many of the perpetrators are in their teens."
I don't follow how we can lay the responsibility for this increase in attacks at the feet of people from the Middle East coming to the UK if the motives are so different. The method is the same but the motivation is fundamentally different.
Perhaps the simpler explanation -- that it's a method of assault that is easier to get away with, has lighter sentences if caught and is not illegal to carry the weapon -- is more likely.
it could be that these immigrant areas are host to immigrants because they are poor areas. immigrants coming in with no connections or history in that country, and who probably came from a less wealthy country, would naturally take up residence in a poor area. and in a poor area, crime is higher. including acid attack crimes.
True. But I think it is the rise in acid attacks that is intriguing. Indeed, a rise in crime in general, and it is correlated, moderately, with Muslim % of population.
Honestly, I used to live in Tower Hamlets, another "immigrant heavy" area for three years, and never felt remotely threatened.
Neither have the demographics in these areas "changed" much. The east end of London has had a large immigrant population since the 1970s and arguably since the 1700s when the Huguenots arrived from Northern France.
The most danger I was ever in was when they discovered an unexploded WWII bomb next to my flat ("The parties we've had in here, if it was going to go, it would have by now").
Acid attacks are so incredibly rare (350 last year) that any increase at all in them is going to represent a large statistical increase. If I had to hazard a guess as to why acid attacks were on the increase, it's because carrying a knife carries with it the chance of losing your own life as well and a life prison sentence if you kill someone. It's also (marginally) easier to argue that you're carrying a corrosive substance innocently than if you're found with a gun/knife. You are still 70x more likely to be involved in a knife attack than an acid attack.
Asking why immigration and changing demographics has caused this presupposes there being a racial motive at all. Explicitly asking for evidence which supports your theory suggests you've already made up your mind.
I live in Tower Hamlets and witnessed an acid attack a few weeks ago, the attacker was white and the victims were white. I don't feel unsafe here either.
A lot of the UK is "immigrant-heavy" (I've lived in Leicester and Boston, both of which fit that bill). Seems highly unlikely to be a causal link unless you can show a pattern across many areas.
Seems highly likely to me this is a result of improved and increased pressure over knife crime, pushing criminals into new methods, alongside increased exposure to the idea of acid attacks from news.
The US political alt-right narrative doesn't translate well to the UK, there were many news stories about the acid attacks and the TL:DR; was that these attacks used to be directed towards women in conservative muslim immigrant communities but these days it's just a convenient weapon for gang activities and jealous or vindictive lovers - immigrant or not.
Why it is a convenient weapon? Cheap to buy and readily available, easy to carry around in a bottle and completely legal(I think that part is changing).
Some Immigrant neighbourhoods being poor is nothing new, and poor neighbourhoods suffering from criminal activities is again nothing original. Again, these neighbourhoods are not new and the immigrants hadn't moved there recently. So it doesn't look like some kind of immigrant critical mass was reached and they start throwing acid.
So no, you hadn't uncover a mystery or spoken the words that nobody dares to.
My guess would be that someone used acid for their criminal activities and had positive(from offender POV) results and it spread out as MOW.
> He says assailants use acid today for many of the same reasons as they did in Victorian times:
Ok but there is a recent rise. Why the recent rise?
I heard that it's because guns are banned. But that didn't happen just in the last few years. So did acid become cheaper to purchase or gun and knifes got harsher penalties recently.
Wonder if there is sort of a copycat thing going on, people hear about it and some say "Oh my, how horrible" maybe the criminals are saying "Yeah, good idea, look how horrified everyone is. I know what I am using next time I am going on a rampage".
What about parts of UK. Where are these attacks happening? Financial district, suburbs, drug trafficking areas, maybe that might provide a hint on the underlying reason.
There is a rich literature on culture-bound syndromes [0], but the same phenomenon is visible in certain criminal behaviors. To state it succinctly, crimes can be memes.
In the US, for instance, the school shooting is a meme: it's just what you do when you are massively angry at society and want to take revenge on it. Previously, "going postal" [1] was a meme amongst angry postal workers.
In Italy, several years ago, there was a string of incidents of rocks being thrown from highway overpasses, striking cars. The government reacted by numbering all overpasses to make reporting easier, but AFAIK what really kept it from becoming a meme was an informal agreement with the media to relegate such news to small articles in the inner pages. When this was done, the number of imitators quickly petered out, and the meme disappeared.
As for acid attacks, this is a meme that came from south-east Asia (e.g. Pakistan), where it was endemic a few decades ago. It spread to the UK due to its large population of immigrants from those countries, and for a while it was mostly confined within the Asian (in the UK sense) community, but it has now spread into the general population.
This is clearly an unpleasant observation, but it is quite obvious if you have paid attention to the crime news over the last few decades. I remember acid attacks in the UK making the international news when I was a child. Back then they followed what the NPR article calls the "global pattern" ("males attacking young women and girls, relating to rejected sexual advances or marriage proposals or dowry-related attacks"), and the attackers were not native Britons. But if we could look at detailed statistics for this crime, I bet we would see both an increase in prevalence, and an increase in the percentage of British perpetrators.
It is very tempting to ascribe these criminal memes to purely non-cultural factors, such as the availability of firearms in the US, and their limited availability in the UK, but it does not really work. School shootings were not always as prevalent in the US as they are now [2], nor is their prevalence proportional to that of guns across countries [3]; rocks and overpasses still exist in Italy [citation needed]; and the availability of acid in the UK has not increased relative to other cheap instruments of harm (e.g. knives, hammers), nor relative to other countries.
BTW, the fact that acid attacks existed in Victorian times (but how common were they?) has no bearing on any of this. A meme can die out in a place and later be reintroduced from another source, just as a living organism can (e.g. horses in America).
Just like the Jews in post WW1 Germany, it's great (from a certain point of view) to have some group you can point at and blame everything on. Much easier than actually addressing problems and gives people targets to hate.
The UK has been using immigrants, and by extension the EU, in that role for a long time.
(To be clear, I think this is wrong, but it's definitely how it is.)
Did you actually read the article? It says that two-thirds of the victims in Britain are men while, globally, most are women. It's not about women in the UK.
Would you please read the site guidelines and follow them when commenting here?
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
I find it amusing that you didn't shorten this to "The site guidelines mention that". If I would have written Would you please read the article instead of asking if they had read it, would that be ok, or do you reserve that right to yourself only?
I will try to refrain from asking people if they have read anything. I've read the guidelines several times before, but this specific prohibition just slipped my mind. Your comment does feel effectively the same though.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadI have no evidence for this, and no doubt people will correct me; but this is all very off putting.
If the attackers are caught and or the knife is found it can contain dna/fingerprints from either party to link the crime to the suspect.
Acid however by it's nature is "clean" in this regard.
Victims don't carry around weapons to defend themselves right now, if they were able to get hold of a gun that wouldn't change. Essentially the only thing that changes is on the attacker's side; great, so now you've added guns to that equation.
Well, if you do that, then I guess you also need to arm the police. Most police force in the UK is not firearmed (the UK has a strong notion that the police are civilians in uniform), but if you're giving more tools to attackers, the police will need to respond in kind.
So effectively, by adding guns, you've done nothing to prevent acid attacks and you made it so that the police making a mistake can end a life.
Edit: I misinterpreted the parent comment!
For example, handguns and other concealable weapons were almost non-existent in Australia when I was living there. As a side effect, there were a lot of fistfights; far more than I've ever seen at equivalent bars/pubs in the US. That sucked, but I still found it preferable to being shot/mugged at gunpoint.
Likewise, acid attacks are terrible, and there are possibly more of them since guns and knives are less accessible. Doesn't mean that overall things are worse because of the ban.
> Acid attacks in the U.K. actually date back to before Victorian times.
> Most of the attacks in the U.K. are random
> The man who attacked him, 29-year-old Michael McPherson
Damn those liberal immigration policies for enabling a white man with a Scottish surname to carry out an acid attack.
All: the rules are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please imbibe their spirit and stick to it when commenting here.
Also, as a small unrelated note, I doubt calcium carbonate would work well for neutralizing sulfuric acid-- the calcium sulfate formed is for the most part insoluble and stops the reaction.
[1]http://itonlyadds.blogspot.co.at/2012/08/on-chemical-burns-v...
[2]https://www.soapqueen.com/bath-and-body-tutorials/tips-and-t...
[3]http://www.certified-lye.com/MSDS-Lye.pdf
What is sad is it's taking so long for policians to wake up and realise that some non-scientist carrying a huge jug of acid in a backpack is kinda obviously incriminating...
Street officers are usually pretty experienced and capable of making a judgement whether this should be looked into further. If needed, the evidence and circumstances can be reviwed in court.
It's not an all or nothing situation. We're capable of nuance.
so the people are the building blocks from which a society is built. everything in that society is a function of the people. so it is possible to assess a given society on a similar scale to the people: a certain society that has a certain distribution of certain kinds of people will experience certain outcomes. let us imagine that we take a large sample of societies and subject them to this idea where everyone gets their own personal nuclear weapon. in fact, lets boil it down to its logical core: let us imagine that every single person in society is given a button. if they press the button, the entire society will be instantly destroyed. they are all aware of this when they get their button.
on one extreme side of the scale or spectrum, a society filled with extremely smart, well educated, well adjusted and emotionally healthy people who all have great jobs and lives, in other words a properly structured society filled with very good people, not a single instance of button pressing would occur. you could in fact give each person the power to end the world and the world would go on unharmed. this is the goal. it can never be achieved because sometimes people go insane or have a bad break up or what have you, but its no different than an electronic device trying to use power as efficiently as possible: electronics strive for zero power consumption and societies should strive to reach the point where the aforementioned scenario is possible.
now we look at the real world. we see that gun control, voting, and all kinds of other things are actually the same thing: different ways in which citizens are trusted or not trusted with power. we see that in a healthy democracy or republic, the vote is far more powerful than the gun. we see that any healthy democracy or republic requires that its citizens are up to the task of handling power responsibly. and i think that if you agree with all the previous statements, you agree that much of the western world is in a lot of trouble right now. and say that without even the smallest shred of arrogance or snobbery.
so, this leads to a very interesting consideration of the limits of power that the citizens of the united states or the united kingdom might handle before something bad happened. and it is also fun to consider what the maximum amount of power the citizens are capable of handling after some kind of focused effort to make them ready. how much power could they handle if schools and jobs and everything were made better? what is the best outcome we might hope to achieve?
so the answer to your questions is that no, individuals probably shouldnt have nukes but they could probably handle some really dangerous stuff like chemical weapons or heavy machine guns if you just gave them the tools they need.
ExpectedHarm = P_incident * Harm
Weapons multiply harm, and education reduces P. Nuclear weapons cause ExpectedHarm to approach infinity almost regardless of P_incident, so they are out. But guns, knives, acid, and other weapons all sit along a continuum.
Increasing access to guns unquestionably increases ExpectedHarm (arguments like 'if everyone had guns, people would be well behaved' are, of course, ridiculous on their face), but there are social benefits to guns. Some people enjoy hunting, sport shooting, and carrying a gun makes many people 'feel' safer (which, though hard to quantify, remains a true social good, in some sense). Guns are also, to some degree, a check on government power. I don't particularly like the Bundy's position or what they stood for, but their access to guns is absolutely what gave them the power to make that stand. You can count this as a positive or negative depending on your perspective. I tend to count it as a positive even though most uses of it, like the Bundy's, I strongly disagree with.
And finally, there is the sort of 'constant' boost to the positive side you get from the general bias we ought to have against banning things (you may choose to set this to zero or negative if you hate freedom). So, the full equation is:
SocialGood + LibertarianBias - P_incident * Harm * BanEfficacy
If this expression is greater than zero, you should leave it alone. This does ignore some theoretical nonlinear terms (e.g. banning guns increases the probability of other forms of violence, or vice versa), but it more or less captures the idea. Depending on which values you input for various terms, you'll get a different answer.
All of that is to say that whether or not any given weapon ought to be legal should be evaluated according to a framework that looks something like the above.
Banning or controlling something that could be used as a weapon is not the solution. As has been already demonstrated by controlling firearms and knives, criminals will just find an alternative.
I haven't seen that stated, let alone proven - can you back up that statement?
Then review increases Swedish acid attacks.
Focusing on just the UK as if it was some mystically isolated scenario is intentionally skewing the statistics and the discussion to allow for demographic plausible deniability.
I'm not here to assert the correctness of my position, for the record, especially since I've already pointed out one only has to look at similar cases from Germany and Sweden. I've already placed my bets on the inevitable rise of European private prisons within the next ten years.
Sounds to me like you are saying you have no evidence for that claim.
and acid attacks: https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/hd-map-a...
Again - I'm sure you could locate the source or find much more recent maps to show the correlation. The borough with the second highest Muslim population currently has the highest number of Acid attacks.
If you want to make such a outlandish claim, you need real sources where this has been studied and thought out carefully.
Sounds to me like you are making up statistics to push your narrative. It sounds a lot like the "black people are only x% of the population, but y% of prisoners in the USA!" you hear racists hark back to a lot. See a vague correlation, assume causation.
I also dislike your implication. Just because numbers don't seem to pass your standard (which isn't a coincidence, those numbers are very politically charged) does not change the fact that it is very much a problem that muslim communities impose their "values" on women (and elderly, and kids, and ...) with violence in immigrant neighborhoods in the west. Most worrisome these days is that not a week goes by without an article how some banal government intervention (fire brigade, wasps, car crash, shoplifting, ...) goes by without muslim youth attacking everyone, the police, firemen, bystanders, ...
But if you want to see whether this is happening or not, just go there. They've got good food (if you like it), and it won't take you very long to see aggression in the street against women at all. Probably nothing as serious as acid throwing, probably just shouting, but you'll see it. In the evening, especially on fridays, you stand a very good chance to see a physical confrontation between the police and locals near the police station or perhaps the train station.
Or perhaps just search it on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP51aD_72PU
Search it and you'll see just how common and normal these things are. Or visit.
I don't care how much your worldview depends on denying these things are real. They are fact, they are obvious, and they have become so banal, so normal, and in some cases so brutal. Meanwhile, you'll never read about these incidents in either the normal press, or on the BBC or newspapers, and figures detailing these events are so absurd they're utterly ridiculous. More and more stories of people forced out by "crime" (somehow specifically targeting them and not others) keep finding me and dismissing all of them as if this doesn't exist, well, I wish you wouldn't do that.
I can find you a similar number of articles, youtube videos, or whatever of white English attackers. Your "evidence" doesn't show what you claim it does, and you are drawing incorrect conclusions from them. These are not "my standards" - they are the standards for something to be believable, to be valid.
You say "just go there" - I have! I currently live in a town with a very large immigrant population. I have lived in Leicester, the only city in the UK where you are technically a minority as a white English person. I did not see what you are describing.
You have seen a trend of articles and extrapolated them wrongly - it's a common mistake, but one we have seen before. It could be your sources are biased, reporting on those cases more, it could be that the link you are inferring is wrong, it could be that you are selectively remembering articles or picking them out. There is a reason we rely on more than "well, I remember a lot of cases of X being reported" when understanding the world.
Your claim it's all some conspiracy being covered up is untrue. If it was true, where is the evidence - your anecdotal evidence isn't useful. If that's all you respect, well, my years of living in places that fit this bill provide plenty of "counter" anecdotal evidence, so even by that (terrible) standard, it's rubbish.
If your claim is so "obviously" true, then prove it. Find the statistics - show the correlation is there, show that it's not other factors making the correlation.
I don't understand your reasoning. First you claim to be evidence based, and then say wild claims without back up. Okay. I'm sorry but I'm a math major. So let's analyse the claims:
1) my claim is that these attacks happen, and secondarily that they're common in specific areas
2) your claim is that they don't happen
Now my claim is what a logician would call an existential claim. A single anecdote obviously means that it is true, and yes, for an existence proof a single example is enough. This is exactly the approach every constructionist proof follows. And there are some beautiful and important constructionist proofs and I assure you they are quite valid. It doesn't prove the extent of the problem, but it does prove the claim is true. Of course a number of anecdotes does prove the extent of the problem, in the sense that it provides a lower bound. No need for statistics (but read on). Regardless, a single anecdote logically rejects your claim. Many anecdotes, and we both know that there are a great number such anecdotes, even if you count just in trustworthy papers, prove my claim. Again, no need for statistics.
So your supposed scientific view is really bullshit.
Then, your whole argument and it's conclusion is a logical fallacy known as "argument from ignorance". There is a claim A, and you say you destroy the arguments supporting A, and then conclude that (not A) must be true. Logic only allows a claim that "A or (not A)" is true, in that situation. It doesn't matter whether you successfully countered those arguments in ironclad logic, since (not A) NEVER follows. The conclusion closest to your thesis that you can possibly achieve is "we don't know if these things happen or not".
But your arguments have yet more problems than merely the method you claim to be using for deciding the truth, and the logical fallacy used in reaching your conclusion. Your arguments don't actually imply a difference. As a statistician would say, they contain zero information. This means that you could be saying 100% the literal truth and your thesis could be true or false, you could be entirely lying about everything and your thesis could be true or false. Your arguments are not a distinguishing factor in rejecting or accepting the claim that you make. So why make them ?
Your arguments are merely rhetorical, and devoid of meaning. They only appear related. Even worse: the criticism of anecdotes, given your claim, actually attempts to point out a flaw where there is none. It is a direct attempt to deceive. Maybe you're deceiving yourself and this is simply an error, maybe not.
And of course, the other details. First of all, we were all talking here about London, not Leicester. Apparently there are a few other cities that are really also part of London where this also happens. I'm glad to hear Leicester is not one of them.
As for the conspiracy, see [1], for example. Given that logically, a positive claim can be proven by giving a single positive example, while a negative claim (like your "not a conspiracy") cannot be proven by any amount of evidence. Note that anecdotes DO prove a positive claim. If the claim is that something happens, a single such anecdote obviously proves this to be the case. You claim to be evidence-based, and we both know what logic says in this case.
The truth is that while there is a conspiracy to hide these facts, it is not that powerful or well organised at all. It is just a bunch of idiots protecting their reputation under direction of their management. The truth is far worse: these things, like the new normal of attacks on the police and firefighters in almost every instance are banal, trivial, and well known. Life adapts. The police force is no exception. No newspaper reports that tide rose today just like every time it did before. No newspaper reports that there were -once again- "mil...
You then proceed to say we are talking about London - your statement was not bounded to London - if your correlation only holds in London, why is that? That implies that there is another factor influencing things, and only further undermines your link.
Again, you then go on to continue to rant about positive claims - the statement I am arguing was not "acid attacks have happened", it was the one given above, which is not proven by a single positive example. You are not presenting evidence to back up the statement you made.
And then you go into further rants about reporting - which is all totally irrelevant. You can't make broad claims about groups of people based on any reporting like that. It is clear the data can be misleading because of why and how those stories are chosen. Again, you keep falling back to "you can't say this didn't happen" - no one was claiming that! I said I never saw it happen in locations I lived to show the pointlessness of your anecdotal evidence - there is selection bias at play, and it's too small a sample. I'm not claiming they never happened, just that your argument does not prove the point you made. Just because it happened, and was reported on, does not prove a causal link or even a correlation.
Let me make this clear: You made a claim ("There is a correlation between the % of Muslim population and # of acid attacks") with no evidence. If you want to say something like that, you need proof. That is what I have been saying - very clearly - all along.
My claim was that muslim communities do in fact commit violent attacks against people they perceive as being somehow violating islam/sharia (or merely perceived as vulnerable or undesirable for that matter). I then illustrated with examples that, firstly these attacks do happen, and secondly, that the government statistics on that are "routinely misreported" (quote from the linked article).
And once again you make the argument from ignorance logical fallacy. Just because such a correlation cannot be proven DOES NOT prove the opposite. It does not provide any reassurance that your thesis is true. And if you look at it on a somewhat larger scale you will see how your claim is really the unlikely side of the argument.
It is an absolute known fact that muslim communities, by and large, attack their own members if they are perceived to act against sharia. Read Human Rights Watch. Over 20% of the total human population lives in nation where such attacks are in the laws.
Given that over 90% of muslims worldwide do these attacks, directly or through state actions (passively if you will), why would any sane person even accept your claim that such a thing is not done in immigrant communities as a default claim that requires no evidence ? Talk about far fetched.
Do you see the problem here ?
Again, I am not arguing the opposite is proven! You are literally putting words in my mouth.
You are arguing a totally separate point, and just decided to reply to me, for some reason. Please actually read the posts you are replying to and stay on-topic. Your off-topic rants are useless, and you have wasted a lot of my time trying to work out what the hell you are going on about.
Something tells me its not a coincidence.
Yes, that something being racial prejudice. Sad to see this attitude rife on HN.
You forgot to call me a "Nazi" and "bigot" and "facist" and all the other things you ANTIFA folks call those who have different opinions than yourselves.
How many more alt-right talking points can you squeeze out? Your reaction is so amusingly predictable, it’s sad to see someone so programmed to dullness.
But most of the attacks in the U.K. are random and are often connected to robberies or gang violence. Many of the perpetrators are in their teens."
I don't follow how we can lay the responsibility for this increase in attacks at the feet of people from the Middle East coming to the UK if the motives are so different. The method is the same but the motivation is fundamentally different.
Perhaps the simpler explanation -- that it's a method of assault that is easier to get away with, has lighter sentences if caught and is not illegal to carry the weapon -- is more likely.
Neither have the demographics in these areas "changed" much. The east end of London has had a large immigrant population since the 1970s and arguably since the 1700s when the Huguenots arrived from Northern France.
The most danger I was ever in was when they discovered an unexploded WWII bomb next to my flat ("The parties we've had in here, if it was going to go, it would have by now").
Acid attacks are so incredibly rare (350 last year) that any increase at all in them is going to represent a large statistical increase. If I had to hazard a guess as to why acid attacks were on the increase, it's because carrying a knife carries with it the chance of losing your own life as well and a life prison sentence if you kill someone. It's also (marginally) easier to argue that you're carrying a corrosive substance innocently than if you're found with a gun/knife. You are still 70x more likely to be involved in a knife attack than an acid attack.
Asking why immigration and changing demographics has caused this presupposes there being a racial motive at all. Explicitly asking for evidence which supports your theory suggests you've already made up your mind.
Seems highly likely to me this is a result of improved and increased pressure over knife crime, pushing criminals into new methods, alongside increased exposure to the idea of acid attacks from news.
Why it is a convenient weapon? Cheap to buy and readily available, easy to carry around in a bottle and completely legal(I think that part is changing).
Some Immigrant neighbourhoods being poor is nothing new, and poor neighbourhoods suffering from criminal activities is again nothing original. Again, these neighbourhoods are not new and the immigrants hadn't moved there recently. So it doesn't look like some kind of immigrant critical mass was reached and they start throwing acid.
So no, you hadn't uncover a mystery or spoken the words that nobody dares to.
My guess would be that someone used acid for their criminal activities and had positive(from offender POV) results and it spread out as MOW.
Ok but there is a recent rise. Why the recent rise?
I heard that it's because guns are banned. But that didn't happen just in the last few years. So did acid become cheaper to purchase or gun and knifes got harsher penalties recently.
Wonder if there is sort of a copycat thing going on, people hear about it and some say "Oh my, how horrible" maybe the criminals are saying "Yeah, good idea, look how horrified everyone is. I know what I am using next time I am going on a rampage".
What about parts of UK. Where are these attacks happening? Financial district, suburbs, drug trafficking areas, maybe that might provide a hint on the underlying reason.
In the US, for instance, the school shooting is a meme: it's just what you do when you are massively angry at society and want to take revenge on it. Previously, "going postal" [1] was a meme amongst angry postal workers.
In Italy, several years ago, there was a string of incidents of rocks being thrown from highway overpasses, striking cars. The government reacted by numbering all overpasses to make reporting easier, but AFAIK what really kept it from becoming a meme was an informal agreement with the media to relegate such news to small articles in the inner pages. When this was done, the number of imitators quickly petered out, and the meme disappeared.
As for acid attacks, this is a meme that came from south-east Asia (e.g. Pakistan), where it was endemic a few decades ago. It spread to the UK due to its large population of immigrants from those countries, and for a while it was mostly confined within the Asian (in the UK sense) community, but it has now spread into the general population.
This is clearly an unpleasant observation, but it is quite obvious if you have paid attention to the crime news over the last few decades. I remember acid attacks in the UK making the international news when I was a child. Back then they followed what the NPR article calls the "global pattern" ("males attacking young women and girls, relating to rejected sexual advances or marriage proposals or dowry-related attacks"), and the attackers were not native Britons. But if we could look at detailed statistics for this crime, I bet we would see both an increase in prevalence, and an increase in the percentage of British perpetrators.
It is very tempting to ascribe these criminal memes to purely non-cultural factors, such as the availability of firearms in the US, and their limited availability in the UK, but it does not really work. School shootings were not always as prevalent in the US as they are now [2], nor is their prevalence proportional to that of guns across countries [3]; rocks and overpasses still exist in Italy [citation needed]; and the availability of acid in the UK has not increased relative to other cheap instruments of harm (e.g. knives, hammers), nor relative to other countries.
BTW, the fact that acid attacks existed in Victorian times (but how common were they?) has no bearing on any of this. A meme can die out in a place and later be reintroduced from another source, just as a living organism can (e.g. horses in America).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#cite_note-nyr2... [3]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/small-arms-survey-countries-wit...
this article points to a case of someone who most likely isn't an immigrant yet that is the first thing people rush to.
edit: according to the wikipedia page, a disproportionate number of the attacks using acid are against women. why not talk about that instead?
The UK has been using immigrants, and by extension the EU, in that role for a long time.
(To be clear, I think this is wrong, but it's definitely how it is.)
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I will try to refrain from asking people if they have read anything. I've read the guidelines several times before, but this specific prohibition just slipped my mind. Your comment does feel effectively the same though.